Page 48 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

"And you?"

My wolf wants to answer with posture: squared shoulders, level gaze, the alpha stance that says I'm not apologizing for being here. The man overrides the wolf because the man has learned something in this fortress that the wolf hasn't: Stellan doesn't respond to posture. He responds to honesty, and the honesty needs to come without the alpha display that would make it look like a challenge.

"I knew," I tell him. "Since the cottage."

"And you stayed."

"I stayed."

"Are you staying for asylum or for her?"

The question is a blade laid flat on the table. Not a threat. An assessment. Stellan isn't asking because he doesn't know the answer. He's asking because he wants to hear me say it, and the saying will tell him whether the answer is strategy or truth.

I don't hesitate. Hesitation would be a lie, and my body doesn't know how to lie when the question is about Signe.

"Both." The word lands clean. "My uncle is sitting on a territory that borders yours, and he'll be a worse neighbor than my father ever was. You need an allied border. The Ashwood and Greymoor packs need a Drakfell that doesn't answer to a wolf who murdered his way into the alpha's chair. I need my home back, and I'm going to take it. When I do, the territory that borders your northwestern ridge will be run by a wolf who owes you a debt for sheltering him when he had nothing."

I stop. The next words are the ones that matter, and the mattering is why they need to come right.

"She needs a claiming bond before every unmated alpha in range decides she's worth fighting for." The words come out hard and clean, because they're true. An exposed omega without a mark is a target, and Stellan knows it better than anyone in this room. "I'm the wolf standing between her and that."

Signe's gaze catches mine. What I find there isn't gratitude. It's the hard, clinical precision of a woman who just heard the wolf next to her stake a claim on her future in front of the pack alpha, and is deciding whether to let it stand.

She lets it stand.

The restraint of not saying more takes everything I have. My wolf is clawing at my throat, every instinct I own demanding that I make the rest of the case: that the pack's best healer has been serving this fortress with more skill and dedication than any wolf alive and the fact that she's omega doesn't diminish a single day of it.

I want to say all of that. I want to say more. I want to tell this alpha that the woman standing against his wall has been carrying a weight that would have crushed most wolves, and if Stellan can't see the value in what she's built then the loss is his.

I don't say any of it. Because that's her case to make, not mine. She's the wolf who told me to get off her worktable, who hit me before she kissed me, who finished a surgery with her hands shaking because the steadiness that defines her isn't in her muscles but in her training. She doesn't need me to argue her competence. She needs me to shut up long enough for her to do it herself, which is the hardest thing I've ever done in a room where the silence is trying to bury someone I'd die for.

Signe's expression changes. The change is small enough that Stellan might miss it, but I don't miss it because I've spent weeks learning the difference between the mask and the woman. She didn't correct me. She didn't add a qualifier or strip the claim back to clinical language. She let it stand, and the letting shows in the tightness at the corners of her mouth.

Stellan watches both of us for a long moment. His gaze moves between the packless alpha who just made a territorial claim and the healer who just told him the foundation of their professional relationship has been a performance.

The silence stretches. Signe breaks it with the quiet precision of a woman who has decided she's done letting other wolves frame her situation.

"The fact that no wolf in this fortress detected what I am for years is evidence of my competence, not a reason to question it."

Her voice carries the quiet authority she deploys with patients who argue about their treatment, with patrol wolves who resist her orders, with anyone who has ever mistaken her composure for deference.

"I'm still the best healer in three territories. That hasn't changed. My designation doesn't diminish a single day of service I've provided to this pack."

Stellan holds her stare. The acknowledgment, when it comes, costs him nothing.

"No," he says. "It doesn't. What has changed is the political landscape of this fortress, and you'll navigate it under my terms or you'll navigate it somewhere else."

"Understood."

"The Drakfell situation." Stellan turns to me, and the alpha assessment strips away everything I just said and weighs the strategic core that was underneath it. "If you reclaim the territory, the Northwestern border stabilizes. If you fail, I've sheltered a packless alpha who brought Balric's wolves to my gate."

"I won't fail."

"You failed your father."

The study holds the words the way stone holds cold.

Stellan doesn't blink. He doesn't soften. He lets the sentence sit between us with the full weight of a man who chose it for maximum damage and isn't sorry.